Validating Temporal Eye Tracking Metrics as Orthogonal Biomarkers for Aggressive Traits: A Mixed-Effects Analysis

Atypical visual attention to aversive or threatening stimuli is a clinically relevant feature of aggressive behavior. However, the developmental dissociation between sustained visual allocation and early orienting remains unclear. This study examined the temporal dynamics of visual attentional biases in a sample of 119 children and adolescents (51 males, 68 females), clinically and behaviorally categorized into aggressive and non-aggressive cohorts. Using a free-viewing paradigm with standardized emotional stimulus pairs selected from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS), eye-tracking analysis focused on first-fixation direction and dwell time. Inferential analyses were conducted using Linear Mixed-Effect Models (LMM) and Generalized Linear Mixed-Effects Models (GLMM). The linear model revealed a significant main effect of behavioral condition: individuals with aggressive traits, regardless of their stage of development, showed greater sustained visual allocation toward negative stimuli. In contrast, the GLMM for first-fixation direction identified a significant age-by-condition interaction, indicating that early orienting differences were more clearly expressed in the aggressive adolescent cohort. These findings suggest that sustained visual preference for negative content may represent a relatively stable correlate of aggressive traits, whereas early orienting differences may vary across developmental stages. Together, these two temporal eye-tracking measures may provide complementary information for future computational approaches to aggression screening. In conclusion, these two temporal oculomotor dimensions may provide a useful feature space for future machine-learning pipelines and may serve as complementary candidate markers for comparing computational predictions against clinically established ground truth in aggression screening research.